As gyms, swimming pools and leisure centres reopen for individual training this week, young children who have been unable to learn how to swim over the past year are now playing catch up ahead of summer holidays.
At Dartry Health Club in Dublin 6, Grace (7) and Olive (3) Kavanagh resumed lessons on Monday for the first time in a year.
The biggest concern for their mother, Amy Kavanagh, is that progress may have been lost while the swimming pools were closed.
“Grace started swimming when she was three, and she was almost six when the pandemic kicked off.”
Due to initial nerves, it took Grace a year to get used to the water “before starting to do proper swimming”.
Instructor Dave Tyrrell “did a lot of groundwork with her” and now she “absolutely loves the water and was really missing it during the lockdowns”, her mother says.
“My concern in the last year is that she’s kind of lost that and gone backwards a bit while things were on pause.”
As for Olive, she was having her first ever swimming lesson on Monday with her big sister.
“She was due to start last year but everything was closed. I see swimming as an essential life skill, and especially with summer holidays coming up around Ireland, we’ll be on the beach or at the swimming pool, and I’m nervous for the three-year-old because if she gets in, she could get into trouble very quickly,” says Amy.
Confidence paramount
Tyrrell says the shutdown has been “hard on the families” as kids become more reluctant to get into the water as they get older.
As almost half of the population of Ireland lives within 5km of the sea and most people live within 20km of either the sea, a lake or a river, “safety is paramount”, says Tyrrell.
“Kids need to be confident in the water. The difference we’ll see in the kids we’ve built the fundamentals and foundations with is – those will be gone. We’ll have to start from scratch with them.”
Before the pandemic, the Dartry club taught rookie lifeguard classes to kids aged eight to 12 who were strong swimmers.
“We taught them first aid, how to use defibrillators, and recovery positions,” says Tyrrell. “These are massive skills but it’s something we unfortunately don’t see coming back for a good while because it’s very hands-on.”
On the plus side, the “excitement around the place is great, and the demand has been off the charts,” says Tyrrell. The club has had to turn people away due to limitations on numbers.
“From September we’ll be able to have more kids back, but the number of parents contacting me now in almost a panic saying, ‘She’s six and she hasn’t had any lessons, where are we going to go?’ The big thing for me is we’ve been able to start now, and we’ll have kids back for four or five weeks before parents start going on summer trips.”
